Those Faraday Girls

by Monica McInerney

She read for the entire journey, having a brief break when Gabriel stopped to refuel and buy a map of Dublin. She was soon oblivious again to her surroundings, to the passing towns, fields and housing estates. She was back in the 1960s, inside her grandmother’s mind, hearing her thoughts. Tessa was now pregnant with Sadie.

  I’ve been sick this entire pregnancy. A friend of mine told me there’s an old wives’ tale that if you don’t want to be pregnant, your body tries to get rid of the baby. Well, mine isn’t trying hard enough. Bloody Leo, it’s all his fault. I told him three children were enough for me.

  There was a gap between entries.

  My first diary entry in three months. Still recovering from the most painful birth yet. Sadie Mary. Not an easy baby. A crier. I leave her to Leo at night-time. I have enough to do in the daytimes as it is with the other girls. I’ve told Leo we have to get help in the house or I will surely collapse.

  Another gap of six months.

  Feel like I am losing my mind. Sadie is like a cat, mewing mewing mewing all day and all night long, the noise constant in my head. Growing pains, the doctor said. She’ll get over it. I just want to leave her to it. I confessed as much to the nurse and got all the usual guff about giving myself time to bond. How much more time do I need??? I’m not imagining it, this baby feels different.

  Five months later, the news that Maggie had been waiting to read.

  Pregnant again! Told Leo this is the last time. Five babies are enough for any woman. Barely a year between this one and Sadie. If she’s as difficult as Sadie I truly don’t know how I will cope.

  She held her breath as she started to read about the arrival of her own mother.

  Another girl. I was disappointed for a second when I heard it wasn’t a boy but this one has the face of an angel. The other girls very excited. Juliet wanting to take it home straightaway, told me she will look after it until I get home! Miranda disgusted that it’s another girl, wanted to know if we could swap it for one of the newborn boys in the ward. She does make me laugh. Eliza slightly interested. Leo besotted, yet again. Picked her up yesterday and called her his little darling, strangely just as I had heard ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ playing on the ward radio. Clementine it is! She is the most wonderful baby, so peaceful, calm, a pleasure to look after. Feeds when she should, sleeps when she should. So pretty.

  Maggie felt her eyes fill with tears. For a moment she had nothing but warm thoughts towards Tessa. The feeling didn’t last long.

  Sadie is driving me crazy! So jealous of her little sister, whingeing all the time, wanting to take her bottle from her. Caught her trying to climb into Clementine’s cot today. Told the nurse about it. She said to be careful not to leave them alone together, that there have been reports of older siblings suffocating new arrivals. Wish it was the other way around. Feel guilty for saying that!!!

  The entries for the next two years were few and far between. Snippets about Juliet’s love of cooking. Funny things Miranda had said. Complaints about Leo, how exhausted she was, how much work there always was to do, how suffocated she was feeling. Talk about her scrapbooks, how they at least gave her something to do that didn’t involve washing or cleaning. There were enthusiastic reports about Bill’s visits, but nothing that Maggie could tell hinted at a physical relationship between them.

  The year Clementine turned four there was an important entry.

  Bombshell news today. We are off to Tasmania. Didn’t even know where it was until Leo got the map but like the sound of adventure. Older girls very excited. Miranda very funny, parading around with an apple when Leo told her it was called the Apple Isle. Sadie upset. Scared to go on the boat. Whinge, whinge. That child would find something to complain about even at Christmas, I’m sure of it.

  There was a four-month break before the next entry. Maggie read each word even more carefully. They were now in Hobart – in the house she had grown up in, the city she called home and among the scenery she loved. It quickly became clear that Tessa wasn’t as impressed.

  There was little about Hobart itself, or about Leo and his job, apart from her being glad there was more money coming in. The new house was too draughty. Hobart was beautiful, so clean after London, but where were all the people? She was also getting even crosser with Leo.

  He’s back in his bloody inventing phase again. Jokes all the time that it’s in his blood. Out in the shed for hours each night, fine by me.

  No kindred spirit at the girls’ school, all the women a bit behind the times if you ask me. Girls have settled in, except for Sadie. Tears all the time again, doesn’t want to go to school, says she is scared of the teacher. She has to be the most annoying child to walk this planet. So whining. So hesitant all the time. I watch her hanging around the edges of groups of kids and want to push her forward.

  There were more funny little stories about the other four, but none about Sadie. Maggie read back, just to double-check. There wasn’t a single one.

  Sadie having nightmares again. Sent Leo in to her the last few nights, she seems to settle better for him than me. At least he agrees with me. As he put it, there’s a runt in every litter, and Sadie’s our runt. Don’t expect too much of her, he tells me. I just wish she didn’t annoy me so much. It’s almost a physical thing. She is so needy, wanting to be hugged and petted all the time. It’s like she’s the cuckoo in the nest.

  Twice Maggie found herself wiping away a tear. Gabriel noticed.

  ‘Are you all right? Do you need to stop?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ She didn’t know who she was crying for. Sadie? Leo? Her whole family?

  She finished reading the final diary as they reached the outskirts of Dublin. She closed the cover. She didn’t speak. She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘That’s it?’ Gabriel asked, glancing over.

  She nodded.

  ‘Did it get any better?’

  She shook her head.

  She now knew all it was possible to know. She’d read every page; knew what Tessa had thought and felt about her life, her husband and her daughters, right up until a few days before she died. She also knew exactly what Sadie had read.

  Maggie was angry. She was confused. Mostly, though, she was sad. Sad for Sadie, and how she must have felt reading this. For Leo, who must have suspected how Tessa really felt about him, who had spent so many years jealous of his own brother, who had tried, endlessly, optimistically, constantly, to make Tessa love him as much as he had loved her.

  Maggie even felt sad for Tessa, in a strange way. So full of conceit, writing so carelessly and cruelly, unaware that in two weeks’ time she would be dead. There was a passing reference to her forthcoming operation – a hysterectomy, Maggie realised. She had winced at her words: Can’t keep Leo away from me, so at least this will mean I can’t get pregnant AGAIN. Her final entry was about how bad the hospital food was, how bored she was and how pleased she was that the woman in the opposite bed had gone home.

  There were four lines about the idea of the July Christmas: I’m hoping it will help convince Leo that it’s time we went back to the UK. I’ve had enough of being here. If he doesn’t agree, I’m tempted to just stay there myself next time I go back on holiday. That’d bring him over quick-smart!

  All these years the family had been celebrating the July Christmas, thinking it was a wonderful tribute to Tessa and her imagination. Yet the only reason she had proposed it was as part of a plan to get Leo to agree to returning to the UK. Purely selfish reasons.

  All Maggie had read the past two days filled her head. It was hard to make sense of it. Even harder to imagine talking to Sadie about it. ‘Gabriel, can we stop somewhere? I think I need some fresh air.’

  ‘Of course.’ They were on a motorway, coming into Dublin. He saw it first, a signpost for the Phoenix Park, two kilometres away.

  They drove in through wrought-iron gates, the park opening up in front of them, all meadows and green fields. The trees were lush with summer growth. Gabriel drove for a short while befor
e pulling into a side road. They were the only people there.

  They got out of the car and began to walk. Maggie brought her leather bag with her, hitching it over one shoulder, the diaries a heavy weight inside. They had gone only a short way, across a small wooded area towards a path, when she started to talk.

  ‘Leo will be pleased about one thing. Bill isn’t Sadie’s father. It wasn’t that.’

  ‘That was all he wanted to know, wasn’t it? The most important thing for him?’

  Maggie nodded. ‘Leo is definitely the father of them all.’

  ‘But if it wasn’t that that made Sadie go, it must have been something else. Do you think you found it?’

  ‘I think so.’ She didn’t think it. She knew it. She glanced up at him. ‘Gabriel, does your mother love you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does your mother love you?’

  ‘Of course she does.’

  ‘Would it matter if she didn’t love you? Didn’t like you?’

  ‘Would it matter?’ He thought about it. ‘It would be very hard. I’d think there was something wrong with me. That it was my fault.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because all mothers love their children.’

  ‘Do they? Can I read you something?’ She reached into her bag, opened the diary at random and began to read some of Tessa’s words about Sadie.

  Gabriel could hardly believe it.

  ‘The diaries are filled with it,’ Maggie said. ‘It goes on and on like this, from when Sadie was born, until just before Tessa died.’ She flicked forward to the end of the final diary and read it aloud to Gabriel:

  Have just cancelled Sadie’s birthday party. More tears, of course. She’s been carrying on so much, all upset because the girls she invited can’t come or some such nonsense. As I said to her, it’s a hard world out there and the sooner she realises that the better. She started to go on and on about it, as usual. What’s wrong with me, Mum? Why haven’t I got any friends at school? Do you love me? What was I supposed to say, the truth? No, Sadie, I don’t think I do love you. You actually drive me crazy. I told her to just put it behind her, she could have a party another year, and of course I got hit by another flood of tears. It’s a terrible thing not to like one of your own children, but I can’t help it.

  Maggie shut the diary and pushed it back into her bag as if she wanted to hide it. ‘What would you do if you read that, Gabriel? If you read that your mother didn’t like you; in fact, was sure she didn’t even love you; that your father thought of you as the runt and that both parents thought your four sisters were better in every way than you?’

  ‘I’d want to get as far away from that family as I could.’

  ‘I would too.’

  ‘You think that’s what happened?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘But why take you with her?’

  ‘Because I was there? Because I didn’t hate her? I don’t know.’

  They started walking again. ‘Why would Leo keep up the charade, Maggie? It’s like he’s remembering a different woman.’

  ‘Maybe it was easier for him that way. Maybe that was the only way he could keep the family together after she died.’

  ‘She can’t have been all bad, can she?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘Was she beautiful?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Perhaps that was it. Sometimes that’s enough. People get bewitched by beautiful women.’

  ‘But would that feeling last for years?’

  ‘There must have been more. From what Leo was saying, she entertained him. Amused him. She gave him a family. All those things would count for something.’

  Maggie didn’t know what she should do next. ‘It would have been simpler if Bill was Sadie’s father. At least Leo is expecting that. I can’t tell Leo all of this. And I can’t go to Sadie and ask her to come to Donegal and rejoin the family. Why would she want to? She read everything I did. She knows what Leo said about her. She knows that the July Christmas wasn’t some lovely family tradition. It was just Tessa hatching a plan.’ That had hurt Maggie more than she expected. ‘What do I do now, Gabriel?’ It wasn’t fair to ask him, but she was lost.

  He was quiet for a moment. ‘I think you’ve got three options. Maybe even four. You can go to her work, or to her house. You can ring her. Or you can do nothing and we can go straight back to Donegal. Tell Leo exactly what you read, what you think, and leave it to him to sort out.’

  She couldn’t do that. Not yet. Not after coming all this way. Not just from Donegal, but from New York too. ‘If I ring, she might say no. It’s easier to hang up on someone than to say no face to face.’

  ‘Do you want to go to her office?’

  ‘She might not even be in Dublin. We should have rung before we got here. She could be away somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, she might. Or she could be sitting at home right now.’

  ‘Why did I let Leo talk me into this?’

  ‘He didn’t. You offered.’

  He was right. She had.

  ‘I checked the map, Maggie. We’re not far from Phibsboro. Two kilometres at the most.’

  ‘That close?’ Maggie tried to picture a scene. A suburban house, one of the terraced houses they’d passed on their way. Sadie in her kitchen, making tea. Or in her garden, or watching TV. Unaware that her niece was so close. That her entire family was in the same country. The choice was Maggie’s. She could come crashing into that life and upset who knew what, or she could decide to do nothing; leave everything as it had been for the past twenty years. ‘That woman might not even be her,’ she said again.

  ‘Don’t you want to find out for sure?’

  She thought about it for a few minutes. She couldn’t stop the search here. ‘Let’s go to her house.’

  In her Dame Street office, Sadie checked her watch. Larry had phoned that morning to say he hoped to be home by five. She decided she wanted to be there to meet him. They hadn’t seen each other for nearly three weeks now. Too long. The longest they’d ever been apart, in fact. She picked up her bag, tied her silk scarf around her neck and walked through to her assistant’s office. ‘I’m going to finish up early, Anne. Larry’s due home and I want to get the house ready for him.’

  ‘You old romantic, Sally O’Toole.’ Anne smiled. ‘Say hi from me. See you both tomorrow.’

  Sadie usually caught the bus home. Stepping out onto the street, she decided it was such a beautiful day she’d walk instead. It would only take her half an hour. She’d easily be home before Larry.

  In Donegal, Leo was in the living room on his own. He’d decided not to join the others on the trip to the beach. He wasn’t a fan of swimming in an icy-cold sea. Besides, he’d had an idea during the night that he wanted to explore. The seed had been planted while he was watching Gabriel operate the camera, noticing that he needed to move the equipment each time he wanted a different angle. Surely there was another, more efficient method? What if the camera was to swivel on the tripod in some way, not just around but up and down, on a sort of extendable arm? That way the operator wouldn’t have to physically move the tripod, just the camera itself. It would be a simple enough mechanism, Leo thought. The trick would be how the camera attached to it. The wires would need to be inside a swivelling case, so they could rotate in different directions.

  All the camera equipment was still set up from the previous day, all the wires neatly coiled, like a proper TV studio. Leo circled the camera, cautiously touching this lever and that button. Extraordinary to think such a small apparatus could hold hours of footage. Gabriel had given him a brief lesson on how it worked, pointing out the viewfinder, the different focus buttons. The technology had changed in a big way even during the time Gabriel had been working with cameras, apparently. It really was marvellous.

  Leo put on his spectacles and started carefully undoing the screws holding the camera to the tripod. The lever was tightly fastened and fiddly to get at. He steadied hims
elf as the tripod started to tilt, grabbing at the camera to steady it, smiling sheepishly to himself. That wouldn’t do, he thought. All those hours of filming the previous day going to waste because he had dropped the camera.

  ‘Ah, there we are,’ he said, as the camera came loose from the tripod. ‘Now we can get to work.’

  In Manchester, Myles Stottington stepped back as the cab driver pulled away from the kerb. He juggled his suitcase, briefcase and jacket, finding his front door key and letting himself into the house. He didn’t call out to Juliet as he normally would. He knew she wasn’t due back from Donegal for a few days yet.

  He left his case in the hallway, hung his jacket on the hook, walked into the living room and opened the window to let in some fresh air. He was hungry, thirsty and tired. It had been a long trip, but a successful one. If all the negotiations came to pass, they’d have another five cafés to add to their portfolio. He’d ring Juliet that night to tell her the good news.

  He came into the kitchen. The first thing he saw was an envelope leaning against the fruit bowl. An envelope with his name on it. Puzzled, he went across. It was Juliet’s handwriting. He picked it up, slit open the envelope and took out the letter inside.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  It was four-thirty. Maggie and Gabriel were parked down the road from what they hoped was Sadie’s house.

  It had taken them less than five minutes to get there. They had driven along the tree-lined main road of the park, past the zoo, through another set of ornate white gates and onto the North Circular Road. Maggie had called out the directions from there. On the way they had passed a guesthouse taking up two of the terrace houses, with a sign saying ‘Vacancies’ hanging out the front. Maggie took a note of the name. If – if – this was Sadie’s house, they might need to stay the night nearby.

  Sadie lived on an attractive street. The terraced houses were of red brick, each with small, well-kept gardens in the front, surrounded by iron railings. There were hanging baskets by each front door: masses of tumbling colour, blue, white and red flowers.